Jonathan Pollard (born 7 August 1954, Indiana) was convicted of spying for Israel against the United States of America in 1986 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty to providing Israel with information about the military capabilities of Arab states, including Iraq.

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Background

In the mid 1980's Pollard had discovered that information vital to Israel's security was being deliberately withheld by certain elements within the U.S. national security establishment. Israel was legally entitled to this vital security information according to a 1983 Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries. The information being withheld from Israel included Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan and Iranian nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare capabilities being developed for use against Israel. It also included information on ballistic missile development by these countries and information on planned terrorist attacks against Israeli civilian targets. When Pollard discovered this suppression of information and asked his superiors about it, he was told to "mind his own business", and that "Jews get nervous talking about poison gas; they don't need to know." He also learned that the objective of cutting off the flow of information to Israel was to severely curtail Israel's ability to act independently in defense of her own interests.
Pollard was painfully aware that Israeli lives were being put in jeopardy as a result of this undeclared intelligence embargo. He did everything he possibly could to stop this covert policy and to have the legal flow of information to Israel restored. When his efforts met no success, he began to give the information to Israel directly.[1]

On 11 May 1998, Israel formally acknowledged Pollard had been an Israeli agent, handled by high ranking authorities within Lekem (Lishkat Kishrei Mada "Bureau of Scientific Relations"), which collected scientific and technical intelligence. Lakem was disbanded following Pollard's arrest.[2]

Sentencing controversy

Pollard's supporters point to how grossly disproportionate his life sentence is when compared to the sentences of others who spied for allied nations. He is the only person in the history of the United States to receive a life sentence for spying for an American ally; the maximum sentence today for such an offence is 10 years.
The median sentence for this offence is 2 to 4 years. Pollard's life sentence is also disproportionate even when compared to the sentences of those who committed far more serious offences by spying for enemy nations. Aldrich Ames who spied for an enemy nation (the Soviet Union), committed treason, and was responsible for the deaths of at least 11 American agents, received the same sentence as Jonathan Pollard. Pollard's only indictment was a single count of passing classified information to an ally.[3]

Wall Street Journal

On February 15 February 1991 The Wall Street Journal published a letter from Pollard, written to his Rabbi in 1989, in which he stated that: any objective examination of the record will show that no American agent, facility or program was compromised as a result of my actions - not one. But this salient fact was conveniently overlooked by Mr. Weinberger, who felt that I deserved the death penalty for having had the audacity to make Israel "too strong." With reference to the type of intelligence that Pollard turned over to Israel, he stated: The problem ... lay in the fact that many of the photos that I turned over to the Israelis were of a number of Iraqi chemical weapons manufacturing plants which the government did not want to admit existed. Why? Well, if no one knew about these facilities the State and Defense Departments would have been spared the embarrassing task of confronting Iraq over its violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which banned the use of chemical weapons in war. You have to remember... that at the time of my sentencing the massacre of Kurdish civilians in Halabja had not yet occurred, and what little concern was being voiced over Iraq's apparent use of poison gas was largely ignored by the administration which did not want to anger the Arab world by criticizing the use of such barbaric weapons against Iran. The photos I gave Israel, though, if "compromised" would have jeopardized the administration's policy of callous indifference to this issue, in that they constituted hard, irrefutable proof that Iraq was indeed engaged in the production and wide scale use of chemical weapons. What the administration was really concerned about was being placed in a position where it would have to admit that it had tacitly condoned the creation of an Iraqi chemical weapons manufacturing capability.[4]